Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [184]
“Do you think we’d scandalize the family if we went out dancing?”
“Oh yeah. My mom and aunts think dancing’s basically just the warm-up act. Aunt Mary Edna gives this lecture in Sunday school about how dancing always leads to sexual intercourse.”
“Well, she’s right, that’s probably true for most animals. Insects do that, birds do, even some mammals. But we’ve got great big brains, you and me. I think we could distinguish a courtship ritual from the act itself. Don’t you?”
Rickie fell backward on the ground and lay there for some time with his cigarette sticking up like a chimney. Eventually he removed it so he could speak. “You know what drives me crazy about you, Lusa? Half the time I don’t know what in the hell you’re discussing.”
She looked down at him, her beautiful nephew in the grass. “Drives you crazy and that’s a bad thing? Or a good thing?”
He thought about it. “It doesn’t have to be good or bad. It’s just you. My favorite aunt, Miss Lusa Landowski.”
“Wow. You actually know my name. And here I am just about to change it.”
“Yeah? To what?”
“Widener.”
Rickie raised his dark eyebrows and looked at her from his prone position. “Really. What for?”
“For Cole, the kids, all of you. The family. I don’t know.” She shrugged, feeling a little embarrassed. “It just seems like the thing to do. So this farm will stay where it is on our little map of the world. It’s an animal thing, I guess. Marking a territory.”
“Huh,” he said.
“So, let’s go dancing, OK? Absolutely no funny business, we’ll just dance till we drop, shake hands, and say good night. I need the exercise. You free this Saturday?”
“I am free as a bird this Saturday,” he said, still flat on his back, smiling grandly at the sky.
“Good. Because you know, I’m going to be a mother pretty soon. I’d better get out and paint the town red a time or two while I’ve still got the chance.”
Rickie sat up and stubbed out his cigarette pensively in the grass. “That’s really nice that you’re taking those kids. I mean, nice, hell—it’s more than that.”
Lusa shrugged. “I’m doing it for me as much as for them.”
“Well, my mom and Aunt Mary Edna think it’s like this gift from God, that you’re doing it. They said you’re a saint.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, I swear to God that’s what they said. I heard ’em say it.”
“Wow,” she said. “What a trip. From devil-worshiper to saint in one short summer.”
{28}
Old Chestnuts
This world was full of perils, thought Garnett, and Nannie Rawley was as trusting as a child. She didn’t even realize this man was up to no good. Hanging on to her like a cocklebur, but fifty times more dangerous. Garnett had heard of things as strange as a younger man’s buttering up some pitiful, sweet old woman and marrying her for her money. Now, on that score Nannie was safe, because she probably didn’t have two dimes to rub together until harvest season was done and her crop sold, but she did have the best-producing orchard in five counties, and no living descendants, and everybody around here knew it. There was no telling what this sneaky snake had on his mind.
Garnett couldn’t swear he knew, either, but he knew this much: for two days now, every time he’d happened to catch a glimpse of Nannie out in her garden, there he’d been, leaning on the fence. He hadn’t even lifted a finger to help her carry her bushel baskets of squash and corn into the house. If that fellow set foot inside her house, Garnett was prepared to call up Timmy Boyer on the telephone and get him over here. He would have to. She didn’t know enough to protect herself.
He finished folding the shirts he’d washed yesterday in the washing machine and dried in the dryer. He held the last one up by the peaks of its shoulders and stared at it. It looked as wrinkled and worn as he felt himself. Ellen had had some way of getting them to come out nice and smooth, even without the ironing board. On cool winter mornings before he went to school she’d hand him a shirt to put on that felt as warm as